Your tweets are about to get longer

By Farhad Manjoo, Slate •June 22, 2012 6:44 pm

Almost a year ago, I proposed that Twitter double its character limit from 140 to 280. The microblogging site long ago outgrew its original purpose as a platform for simple status updates. Now people use Twitter for news, jokes, conversations and ferocious arguments — and 140 characters is too cramped. That’s why people often resort to hacks like multipart tweets, ugly textese and TwitLonger to express their expansive thoughts. Though it would be a bad idea to drop the character limit entirely, allowing up to 280 characters would let people add more heft to their tweets while ensuring they wouldn’t drone on.

Everyone thought I was nuts. People at the company pointed out that the service is still used by lots of folks who rely on SMS text messaging for access; the 140-character limit was originally chosen so that tweets would fit within texts, and if Twitter dropped it, texters wouldn’t be able to see the bigger tweets.

Lots of folks on Twitter called me a moron, too, and I had a long, mostly incoherent argument about the merits of longer tweets with Mathew Ingram, a blogger at GigaOm, who wrote a piece calling my idea “dumb.” And not long ago, I went to a dinner at which Twitter CEO Dick Costolo talked about the bad advice people had given the company over the years. One of his examples was the recurrent proposal to drop the character limit. The audience laughed at the stupidity of the idea.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I read last week that Twitter is beginning to push past the sacrosanct 140. In a blog post, the company announced the creation of “expanded tweets,” which will allow for “interactive experiences” within boring old text-laden posts. Technically, all tweets can still be only 140 characters long. But the company is letting select organizations — including The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, BuzzFeed, TMZ and the WWE — append more stuff to tweets that reference their content.

Twitter has posted guidelines for sites looking to create these in-tweet “media experiences,” and they specify exactly how much more expansive the new tweets can be. Headlines in supersized tweets can be 70 characters long. Snippets can be 200 characters long. And that’s on top of the main tweet, which can be 140 characters long. Add it all up and you get 410 characters! I can already picture the billboard. Expanded Tweets — fortified with 270 more characters!

As expanded tweets roll out to all users on all devices, we’ll find that posts that pack 410 characters worth of information will make the network a deeper, more coherent source of news and conversation.

One criticism of expanded tweets is that Twitter has only allowed a few organizations to get expansive. Why do links to The New York Times get expanded but not links to your favorite Ryan Gosling-themed Tumblr? As blogger Dave Winer put it, “no one should think that this is a level playing field, that all content is treated equally, because that is not true.”

In a conversation with a Twitter spokeswoman, though, I got the sense that the preferential treatment is only temporary, part of a slow rollout of a complex technical change.

Costolo himself has fretted about this. In a Fortune interview last year, the CEO was asked whether he felt pressure to make Twitter more dynamic in response to other, more feature-rich social networks. “You know, if you just look in the sideview mirror at what are particular companies doing, and then you start to say, ‘Twitter is going to be the world in your pocket — now with video chat!’ — then you lose your way, right?” Costolo said. “So, we’re going to offer simplicity in a world of complexity, focus on our goal, while we understand what everyone else is doing.”

I don’t think money is Twitter’s main reason for expanding tweets. The more simple explanation is that small blocks of text are becoming more and more out of step with everything else online. The Web is a bustling place that’s overflowing with pictures, movies, songs and blog posts. Twitter’s purpose is to reflect everything that’s going on in this crazy ecosystem. If it takes a few hundred more characters to do so, what’s so bad about that?

Farhad Manjoo is Slate’s technology reporter and the author of “True Enough: Learning To Live in a Post-Fact Society.”